


And You're Still Dead

by Whreflections



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe In Miracles, M/M, Missing Scene, Past Underage Sex, brief reference to past underage sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 23:44:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1666847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wincest form of a missing scene from 9.23- Sam washes the blood from Dean's body before he takes him to his room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And You're Still Dead

**Author's Note:**

> So basically, I saw this post on tumblr-http://brothersintheimpala.tumblr.com/post/86366076165/sam-cleaned-dean-up-before-he-layed-him-on-the-bed
> 
> and it fucking broke me, because it put this image in my head that I will never get out of Sam crying and washing Dean's body clean. 
> 
> So I had to write that pain and share it with all of you before it drove me nuts. Enjoy. And by enjoy, I mean I cried all the way through writing this and my eyes are burning and I'm going to go to bed and try not to gouge them out now; goodnight. T.T

_And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things and I wake up and I_ _  
wake up and you're still dead_

_-Straw House, Straw Dog; Richard Siken_

 

 

He lays his brother down on the bathroom floor, cradles his head in the palm of his hand to set it easy on the tile like he’s made of glass.  Each task takes every last measure of his focus, all his strength pooled into pulling his hands away, standing, taking a washcloth from the drawer and turning on the water to let it warm. 

Cold water would take the blood off better, but Dean, he hates to be cold.  (And still, when they were kids he always told Sam to take his shower first, so that even in the dead of winter in the cheapest godforsaken motel his little brother would be warm and he would tough it out and come out smiling, shaking the cold from his hair, droplets maybe hitting Sam’s hands and his blanket and the pages of his book.)  Sam lets it run and waits, shoves his hand under the stream and centers in on the feel of it against his skin.  He’s crying again, he can feel it, but it’s distant, a weary slide that tracks down his face to collect against his neck and on the collar of his shirt. 

When it’s warm enough to steam just a little in the bunker’s chill he pulls the stopper and dips the washcloth, soaks it through and squeezes until it doesn’t drip so freely.  Simple acts, carefully measured.  He’ll only make it through this if he centers on the details. 

He kneels on the tile, starts with Dean’s face because it’s the hardest to look at it, because when he looks it isn’t Metatron’s fist connecting he sees but his own, swung by Lucifer, blood and bruises blooming under his hands.  (He wakes to the sight of Kevin’s eyes burning out beneath his fingers, it’s true, but it’s a new nightmare, an addition to the rotation.  Since Jess, his nightmares have never left, only cycled.  It was easier, just a little easier when he could wake in the middle of the night, roll over and tuck his face into the warm hollow of his brother’s neck.  So long as he could feel Dean whole and strong and breathing, the nightmares weren’t so heavy of a curse.  He might wake, but Dean was there, and with him, he could sleep.) 

The water runs pink, rivulets snaking down across Dean’s eyelids.  Sam pauses, breathing hitching as he swipes them away with his thumb.  “Sorry.”  He sounds wrecked, he sounds crazy; he’s both, and he knows it.  He apologizes again anyway.  “Sorry, Dean.”  The blood is sticky and thick, so collected at his hairline that Sam has to dip the cloth again.  He holds it in place a moment, lets it soak through the fringe of Dean’s hair that had brushed spikey against the backs of his fingers.  He is slow, methodical.  The time this takes is irrelevant; he has nowhere else to be, no task more vital than this one.  Metatron could bring heaven crashing down to earth while he knelt in this bunker and Sam wouldn't lift a finger, not for a second. 

At Dean’s lips he’s extra careful, mindful of the painful swell.  (And he thinks, this’ll hurt like a bitch when he wake up.  The chest, that’ll be healed.  It’s these bruises he’ll still feel; all the more reason for Sam to take care not to make them worse.)  Sam smoothes the lines of blood away from his mouth, leaves it clean and wet and before he can think, he bends down further for a kiss he shouldn’t take, because it won’t make him feel better, and Dean can’t feel it now, but he can’t resist. 

He’s not wrong; he doesn’t feel better.  His brother’s lips are cold and it’s been months and he knows painfully well how Dean would have responded had he done this just days sooner, how he’d have taken Sam’s face in his hands and pulled him down, kissed him long and deep and moaned with a stark hunger that would leave Sam hot and shaken. 

He doesn’t feel better at all, but he isn’t sorry, either.  He should have done it when Dean was still with him; the least he can do is give him this now, a kiss to tide them over until he wakes. 

He dunks the washcloth, starts on Dean’s neck.  The last time he did this, it was harder, took longer than this ever could.  There was no part of Dean’s body that the hellhounds left unscathed.  They shredded, ripping muscle and breaking bone and slicing organs; Sam watched it in slow motion, relived it slower still as he tended to each and every gash with basins of water in the living room of an abandoned house Bobby found.  Most of the wounds were far beyond his skill with a needle but a few he stitched, the slide of the needle slow and deliberate as he felt Bobby’s eyes boring holes in the back of his neck.  (He could have said a hundred times _he’s gone, Sam; even if you bring him back he’ll need_ _a hell of a lot more’n you can manage with a few sutures_.  He could have, but he didn’t.  He watched, and he shared his whiskey, and he once stepped up from behind to squeeze Sam’s shoulders with painful pressure, murmur in a voice thick with alcohol that Sam was taking good care of him.  He hadn’t known whether to feel reassured or like a goddamn failure.  The saving he couldn’t do; the aftermath, he was decent at.) 

From a structural point of view, then, this is easier.  From all other sides, it isn’t.  Losing Dean is a wound to which he never builds a callus, not even the vaguest beginnings of one.  It’s more like a forever open cut, occasionally jabbed at and widened but ever present, solidly there ever since Dean had first gone down in a pool of water and nearly lost his heart all those years ago. 

He cleans Dean’s hands, swipes blood from the whorls of his fingertips, hates how limp they feel in his grip because Dean’s hands are strong, always, forever holding on and holding him up.  He slows down further when he reaches the end of Dean’s left, extra careful as he trails up his arm because there is little left, and the prospect of raising Dean’s shirt to see the edges of the wound that took his life is almost enough to make his stomach turn. 

Sam sinks to sit on the tile, his knees protesting the movement after their long pressure into the not quite even floor.  The washcloth he presses to his thigh is wet and lukewarm, soaking into his jeans and carrying hints of Dean’s blood with it. 

“You know, I remember what you said to me, when I got stabbed in Cold Oak.”  His voice is rough, scratchy and raw, but strong enough.  There’s no one else to hear.  “I didn’t at first, but later…you said, ‘it’s not even that bad’.  My spinal cord’s cut and you had to know it, but all you’d tell me is that you were gonna take care of it.  Last thing I heard.”  His eyes are blurring, stinging.  He discovered last time, he can only cry for so long before he reaches a state of something like a constant burn, a damp itching pain.  “Last year, too; I wasn’t all the way out till you got me in the back of the car.  I’m…a wreck, and I hear you—“  He can’t repeat it, not those words.

_Just close your eyes a minute, Sammy, ok?  Listen to me, you close your eyes but stay with me, and we’ll get you fixed up.  It’s gonna be alright._

Sam chokes, caught on a sob of laughter.  “And you, you get ripped apart on the floor alone, and all I can do is scream in the background like…like you didn’t already have it bad enough but that’s the last thing you hear, that’s all I can give you?  And tonight, it…Dean, I should’ve said….” 

He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know yet, and maybe that’s the problem.  There are a million things he should say, things he _wants_ to say, but he hates how well he knows the thing he wanted to say the most.

_Don’t leave me, Dean.  Don’t you leave me._

Like he’s four again, left at daycare while Dean goes off to school and the teachers talked to John a dozen times, because every morning he had to be pried away from his brother’s hand.  Neither of them ever wanted to let go but it was always Sam left grasping, Dean who’d reach out and ruffle his hair and smile around an _it’s ok, Sammy; I’ll be back before you miss me_.  Only he wasn’t, he never was, because by the time he said it, Sam missed him already. 

Of the two of them, Dean is the better actor; he’s always known this.  Some moments, he hates that fact more than others. 

Sam presses his palm to the hole in Dean’s t-shirt, rides out a not quite anticipated wave of pain at the concrete reminder that Dean’s chest is still and quiet, free of the steady thrum Sam’s body long ago internalized.  Memory hits him in a rush, vivid and jerking.  Hours ago, Dean’s hand beneath his _right here_ , stemming the blood.  Four years ago, falling asleep with his ear against a beat that reminded him of his own reality, of their reality together.  Fifteen years old, Dean’s hand covering Sam’s against his chest, smiling as he said _We’re not doing this, Sammy.  Not today._   He’d questioned, pushed, insisted he was ready but Dean’s fingers had tightened on his, pressed them closer to the heartbeat beneath them.  _You feel that?  Your hands are shaking, Sam.  You’re not ready.  And we’re not doin’ this till you are; it’s my choice too, and I say no, for now.  But hey, look at me, look at me, Sammy.  That doesn’t mean I’m not gonna take care of you._  

And he did, pulled Sam harder into his lap, kneaded at Sam’s thighs and his hips and his ass with hands that felt much bigger than they probably were, kissed him deep and slow and murmured to him between them in a voice heavy with sex and adoration until Sam came in his jeans hard enough that he felt for moment like he was shaking apart.  His brother held him steady, pressed open kisses to his throat and his bare shoulders, still rock hard but asking nothing of him, nothing more than a rough whisper against his skin _How’d that feel, Sammy?  Tell me._

Dean’s chest was pressed to his, his heart racing, wild and eager, too strong to be silenced. 

Sam can’t lift the shirt; God help him, he can’t.  Not yet.  His head tips forward and he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, breathes in the scent of water and blood on his arms.  His sobs are the kind that hurt, ugly and sharp and too much for a chest already sore, but he can’t stop them; he wouldn’t even try.  Instead he gives in, sinks lower and curls in around a body that is and isn’t his brother, buries his face in a shoulder that doesn’t comfort him and cries until he can breathe without gasping. 

He sits back, tries not to think how Dean would have held him, how he’d have offered his shoulder and his arms and any other part of him Sam wanted if it could give him comfort, how they’d have made love and he’d have fallen asleep with his brother’s arms around him because Dean would have stayed awake, long enough at least to see Sam off. 

He isn’t successful; not at all. 

His hands curl around the hem of Dean’s shirt, his grip tight.  “Dean, if you can hear me—“  His voice wavers, full of hope and hatred.  He shouldn’t hope Dean’s there, standing over his shoulder; he _shouldn’t_.  For the time between now and when Sam brings him home, he should be in heaven; he damn well deserves that much.  “—if you can hear me, it’s gonna be ok.  I can fix this.  I’ll find a way; I won’t give up, alright?  I’m not gonna do this again.  I won’t.”  His breath evens, the certainty of his conviction a sorely needed bolster.  His grip on Dean’s shirt inches away from painful.  “Everything’s alright, Dean.  Just trust me.” 

He pushes Dean’s shirt up, stares down the hole in his chest.  It’s a bloody mess but the edges are neat, too neat, formed around a blade of clean lines and smooth metal.  Sam looks away from it, and starts on the trail of blood against his brother’s stomach.  He can only do this one piece at a time. 


End file.
